By Stephen Johns

In retrospect, we’re glad we didn’t let ourselves get too carried away by the Toronto Maple Leafs’ surprising opening day victory over the Detroit Red Wings. They haven’t won a game since, and instead have become (to paraphrase Dennis Green’s infamous rant) exactly who we thought they were.
A losing team, in other words. Ron Wilson (and, to a lesser extent, Cliff Fletcher) has done an excellent job of minimizing people’s expectations; as a result, a lot of Leaf fans seem strangely dispassionate about the coming year. Rooting for a bad team like the Leafs can be a liberating experience: since a championship is ostensibly out of the question, fans can focus on other, less tangible matters, like how the team’s younger players are developing (notably Luke Schenn, the team’s first-round pick in June’s NHL entry draft, who looks like a budding star). Unfortunately, we’ll have to suffer through our share of lopsided defeats—like last weekend’s 6-1 loss to the Montreal Canadiens, for which thousands of red-clad interlopers descended upon the Air Canada Centre and humiliated a particularly staid Air Canada Centre crowd.
The Leafs haven’t been this potentially awful since at least the late ’90s. We know the team hasn’t won a Stanley Cup since 1967, but not every one of those years was an abject failure. In the last fifteen years, for instance, the Leafs have made four conference finals; that’s not great, not by any means (Detroit has won four cups in the same period), but that’s better than the media would have us believe. (If we listened to people like CTV Sportsnet’s Jim Lang, we might think the Leafs haven’t won a single game since 1967.) This year will be an abject failure, at least in terms of wins and losses. Still, if the Leafs are going to get better, they’re going to have to go backwards. It’s been long overdue for a while; now, it’s unfolding in front of our eyes, just like we thought it would.
Photo by boukesalverda from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.